ReFrederator Blog

It’s Relatively Speaking Week, and the idea was that we would trot out cartoon character kinfolk for the next few days. What you get today is “The Wabbit Who Came to Dinner,” a terrific Friz Freleng item from 1942, wherein Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd do a lot of yappin’ about rich Uncle Louie (or, as EF would have it, Uncle Wouie.)

We will ignore, for the moment, the inconvenient detail that the old guy never actually shows up, and focus instead on how fully these cultural icons fell into character so early in their screen careers. Bugs looks a bit scrawny and Elmer is positively corpulent — about this time Mr. Fudd seemed to suffer an alarming, though temporary, weight gain (I think the idea was for him to look more like the actor supplying his voice, Arthur Q. Bryan, but the end result has him more closely resembling a kidney bean.) No matter. Personality wise, they’re pretty much the wabbit and fallguy we love to laugh at. Our friends at the Big Cartoon Database tell us this is the first instance of Bugs Bunny cross dressing (fair warning: you probably shouldn’t be doing anything like, you know, drinking coffee when that gag pops up —guaranteed spit take!)

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Dave Kirwan